Paul's Blog Entries for June 2006
Thursday 1st June 2006
Fuel Prices
Filled up the Micra at Sainbury's at Cheadle Royal. Petrol was 91.9p a litre, diesel 94.9p a litre. These are around 3p a litre cheaper than any other station that I visit regularly or pass on my usual travels. I wonder why that is?
Local Packages
Updated getmail to 4.6.1
Mail Server
I've been looking at my mail server configuration, trying to find out why so much spam was getting through, particularly for the MCIVTA rôle accounts. Turns out I still hadn't re-enabled spamass-milter after the reinstall I did for Fedora Core 5! I was passing my own mail through spamassassin via procmail anyway, so I still got some spamd log entries, which threw me off the scent. I'd turned off the milter because the load was killing my cripped post-upgrade system. In order to reduce the load in the future, I've whitelisted the Red Hat server that delivers most of the mailing list messages, so those won't go through spamassassin.
Fedora QA
Submitted missing buildreq bug-and-fix for SDL and clearsilver (not actually a missing buildreq issue).
Friday 2nd June 2006
Fedora Extras
Updated perl-Math-Pari to 2.010706
Updated gtkwave to 3.0.4
Local Packages
Updated gtkwave to 3.0.4
Updated perl-File-Find-Rule to 0.30
Rebuilt the Extras packages of SOAPpy and python-fpconst on FC2, FC3, and RHEL4 to satisfy dependencies for python-twisted-web
Updated bittorrent to 4.9.7; the curses client now seems to work, so I've built packages for all suitable distros; the seed client (launchmany) is still broken, though at least it now dies with a message saying about it not yet being ported to the BitTorrent 5.0 architecture
Sunday 4th June 2006
Leon
We have now declared Leon officially mobile. Whilst he could roll about to get where he wanted to go already, and had a bit of a shuffling thing going, it was all rather uncontrolled and he would get to his destination more by chance than by design. He's now got a technique that resembles that of a seal flopping itself forward. It's not real crawling - though I'm sure that will come soon - but it gets him where he wants to go in a reasonably direct way.
Monday 5th June 2006
Local Packages
Rebuilt proftpd with a patch to fix ProFTPD Bug #2792, which causes server reloads to break.
Fedora QA
Tuesday 6th June 2006
Local Packages
Submitted my SELinux policy for proftpd with ftpdctl for review on fedora-selinux-list; you never know, it might end up in upstream policy
Fedora QA
Wednesday 7th June 2006
Local Packages
Updated perl-Module-CoreList to 2.05
Server Outage
Had a brief server outage today. My ADSL line went down, and the usual watchdog script failed to bring it back up. This turned out to be because the pppd log file was configured to be in /var/log instead of /var/log/ppp, which SELinux wasn't happy with, resulting in pppd failing to start up again. It shows how reliable the ADSL link has been though, as I've had SELinux in enforcing mode for at least a week now and this must have been the first time it had been down since then.
Wiki
Turned off the httpd_unified SELinux boolean and fixed the resulting wiki breakage. Since it's now running using mod_fcgid in the httpd_fastcgi_script_t domain, the standard httpd_sys_* domains are no longer accessible. Changed the context types of the wiki directory to the httpd_fastcgi_* equivalents and added a couple of policy rules to allow httpd_fastcgi_script_t to search httpd_sys_* directories (since the wiki lives in the same directory hierarchy as regular CGI scripts). All is now well again.
In fact I've now gone further and split off the FastCGI parts of my local apache policy into their own separate FastCGI policy, and added some equivalent stuff from the regular apache policy that gives capabilities to system scripts, such as accessing a MySQL database. I'll probably bundle that into my mod_fcgid package along with a quick example of how to get moin running under SELinux and FastCGI, then submit it for Fedora Extras,
Thursday 8th June 2006
Local Packages
Updated perl-HTTP-Size to 1.11
Updated perl-HTTP-SimpleLinkChecker to 1.10
Updated bittorrent to 4.9.8; launchmany still not ready
Updated mod_fcgid to include an SELinux policy module (for FC5) and some extra documentation
Wiki
Finally figured out why the !UserPreferences/Login feature wasn't working as intended on this wiki. The default theme (monobook) includes a custom username method that's based on older code. Patching the theme to use a slightly-tweaked version of the base class fixed it, si I'll now revert all the changes I made to make logging in easier.
Fedora QA
Raised buildreq bug-with-fix for banshee
Friday 9th June 2006
Local Packages
Updated getmail to 4.6.2
Dan Walsh at Red Hat doesn't seem too happy with the default mod_fcgid socket directory being var_run_t; since any change would require the use of restorecon in %post, I decided to go for a completely new type (httpd_fastcgi_sock_t) instead of the suggested httpd_var_run_t
Converted all of the arch-independent Twisted packages to arch-specific ones, so that they will all live under the same tree as TwistedCore (necessary for x86_64)
Dropped the TwistedFlow, TwistedPair, and TwistedWeb2 packages, not included in the upstream Twisted bundle
SELinux
Submitted my proftpd/ftpdctl patch upstream
Saturday 10th June 2006
Allotment
The early potatoes aren't doing terribly well this year. About half of the Lady Cristl plot has died off, and although the Arran Pilot plants seem to be thriving, the one I dug up today had only a few very small tubers. I'll be leaving them there for at least another two weeks now.
Monday 12th June 2006
Local Packages
Updated perl-BerkeleyDB to 0.28
Updated curl to 7.15.4
Fedora QA
Buildreq bug-with-fix raised for sendmail
Tuesday 13th June 2006
Local Packages
Updated nmap to 4.10
Replaced moin-theme-mentalhealth with moin-theme-mentalwealth
Wednesday 14th June 2006
Local Packages
Updated bittorrent to 4.9.9; launchmany still not working
Updated dovecot to 1.0.0 beta 9 (running on my own IMAP mail server, FC5)
New package moin-theme-widget, which I'm planning to use for a new wiki-based SHAS website
Thursday 15th June 2006
Local Packages
Updated sendmail to 8.13.7
Saturday 17th June 2006
Fedora Extras
HansdeGoede approved my lat package, after much to-ing and fro-ing around mono packaging methods
Sunday 18th June 2006
Fedora Extras
Michael Fleming started the review process for mod_fcgid; I added some additional documentation and discarded the output of semodule in %postun to address his initail comments
Monday 19th June 2006
Wiki
Updated JpackageJava for Sun Java update 7
Fedora Extras
Reviewed php-pecl-apc for Chris Chabot after ParagNemade, someone I'll probably sponsor before too long, reviewed and approved the package without realizing that he wasn't entitled to do that
Patched lat so as to not use horrible mono hacks like redefining %{_libdir} and using a CPU target of sparc86x
Tuesday 20th June 2006
Local Packages
Fixed tidy so that libtidy-devel depends on libtidy rather than tidy; the problem came to light when a new Core update of kdewebdev obsoleted tidy, causing problems for libtidy-devel
Wednesday 21st June 2006
Local Packages
Updated bittorrent to 4.20.0; despite this officially being a "stable" release, launchmany is still not working and bittorrent-curses needed patching to even get it to start, so as far as I'm concerned this is still a beta
Cleaned up the SELinux support in contagged and sent my last cleanup patch upstream
Thursday 22nd June 2006
Fedora Extras
The version of mock in Extras was updated to the new version, 0.6. This version does away with using comps style groups for populating the buildroot (at least by default), and introduces the use of a buildsys-build package, which is basically empty but has dependencies on all of the packages required for the buildroot. The default list of dependencies is much smaller than with the previous mock release, basically lining up with the BuildRequires Exceptions List from the Packaging/Guidelines, which is good.
In addition to using mock to test-build packages for Extras, I also use it to build packages for old distributions. There are some problems to be overcome to do this though.
For all Fedora Core distributions before Fedora Core 5, and Red Hat Linux 9, an additional package, elfutils, is needed in the default buildroot. It's needed because redhat-rpm-config turns on the creation of debuginfo packages, and eu-strip from the elfutils package is needed for this. In Fedora Core 5, elfutils is a dependency of rpm-build, so it gets pulled in automatically, but this doesn't happen for earlier distributions. There is disagreement about where the dependency should really be (see Bug #111363, Bug #132633, and Bug #155129) so in the meantime (and certainly for end-of-lifed distributions), it needs to be a dependency of buildsys-build.
For all Fedora Core and Red Hat Linux distributions before Fedora Core 3, runuser isn't available and so the mock configuration file needs:
config_opts['runuser'] = '/bin/su'
I can't get mock to build for a Fedora Core 2 target on an x86_32 host, though I'm told it works on an x86_64 host, and it might work with SELinux disabled (not just permissive mode). The symptom is that it hangs up at the useradd mockbuild stage. I'd be interested to hear from anyone that has this working.
To build for a target of Fedora Core 1, you need to set in the host's /etc/sysctl.conf:
kernel.vdso = 0
This is due to a glibc bug (Bug #121351).
Building for any Red Hat Linux target requires rebuilding of many of the original packages, which have broken dependencies due to the use of Epoch: tags and the omission of the epoch in exact version dependencies, such as between foo and foo-devel. Whilst these comparisons worked back in 2003, they don't now.
Building for any Red Hat Linux target older than Red Hat Linux 9 requires file, fileutils, and findutils in the buildroot rather than coreutils (these are needed for the post-build scripts).
Red Hat Linux 7 does not include the redhat-rpm-config package, so it must not be included in the buildroot.
I have built buildsys-build and buildsys-macros packages for Red Hat Linux 7 to 9, Fedora Core 1 to 5, and they are available in my local repository.
Friday 23rd June 2006
Local Packages
Updated getmail to 4.6.3
Updated perl-Sub-Uplevel to 0.13
Monday 26th June 2006
Local Packages
Updated nmap to 4.11
Fedora QA
Raised buildreq bug-with-fix for abiword
Fedora Extras
Had a go at writing an SELinux policy for bugzilla
Tuesday 27th June 2006
Local Packages
Not a good day from a QA point of view.
There's a new release of dkms (2.0.12), but the upstream spec file wants to package a README.dkms that's not included in the tarball.
Update: This has since been fixed by releasing an updated tarball.
There's also a new release of bittorrent (4.20.1) but the curses client doesn't work:
$ bittorrent-curses bordeaux-DVD-x86_64.torrent
bittorrent-curses.py After import _
bittorrent-curses.py after imports
bittorrent-curses.py __main__
bittorrent-curses.py parse_confi...: uiname= bittorrent-curses
bittorrent-curses.py: create CursesTorrentApp
> /usr/bin/bittorrent-curses(397)__init__()
-> assert isinstance(metainfo, ConvertedMetainfo )
(Pdb)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/bittorrent-curses", line 588, in ?
app = CursesTorrentApp(metainfo, config, errlist)
File "/usr/bin/bittorrent-curses", line 397, in __init__
assert isinstance(metainfo, ConvertedMetainfo )
File "/usr/bin/bittorrent-curses", line 397, in __init__
assert isinstance(metainfo, ConvertedMetainfo )
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/bdb.py", line 48, in trace_dispatch
return self.dispatch_line(frame)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/bdb.py", line 67, in dispatch_line
if self.quitting: raise BdbQuit
bdb.BdbQuit... and neither does the GUI:
$ bittorrent
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/bittorrent", line 75, in ?
from BitTorrent.platform import os_version, is_frozen_exe, win_version_num
ImportError: cannot import name win_version_numIt'd be nice if upstream shipped a changelog, responded to bug reports like they used to do, etc. I get the impression they only try things on Windoss before issuing releases these day.
Fedora Extras
Raised Bug #196930 regarding mock support for old distributions
Wednesday 28th June 2006
Local Packages
Updated gtkwave to 3.0.5
Updated dovecot to 1.0.rc1; this needs an SELinux policy change
Fedora Extras
Thursday 29th June 2006
Local Packages
Updated dkms to 2.0.12.1
Job
Been down to the Job Centre for the last time (hopefully!). Although the funding deal for the new company VirtenSys isn't due to be completed until midway through July, employment will effectively start from 1st July.
Fedora QA
Friday 30th June 2006
Local Packages
Updated dkms to 2.0.13
Updated bittorrent to 4.20.2; launchmany still not working but the regressions in 4.20.1 have been fixed
Fedora QA
Raised buildreq bugs-with-fixes for bmp, ccrtp, compat-erlang, cowbell, and dillo